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LETTERS ON CERAMICS - A et C Black - London 2003
Sylvian
Meschia was born and spent his childhood in North Africa
and the forms, colours and sensations that surrounded his early years
are clearly perceptible in his work today. With no formal training, he
learnt his skills as a ceramist with the native craftsmen of Tunisia,
then in the workshops of artists from Southern France, before establishing
his own studio in the rolling countryside south of Toulouse, where he
lives and works today. His Mediterranean origins drew him naturally to
working with the soft earthenware and warm, ochre shades traditional to
the area and he has forged a distinctive mode of expression through his
constantly evolving and original decorative techniques.
His early work involved renewing and revisiting a local style: slip clays
coloured with cobalt, iron and copper oxides are applied in successive
layers to a raw, hand-thrown pot to produce a swirling, marbled effect,
reminiscent of the traditional earthenware of Roussillon. At the same
time, he was developing and perfecting his brushwork, inspired, like many
ceramic artists, by Japanese pictorial and calligraphic techniques. This
led him initially towards bold, simple brush-stroke designs on hand-thrown
pieces, then ultimately to working on a flat surface, with increasingly
elaborate use of paintbrush, bamboo, imprinting and engraving.
The tiles he thus creates are conceived as small ceramic pictures, the
culmination of his pictorial design work, first on paper, then on clay,
applying his craftsman potter’s techniques. He feels that the austere,
flat, square format allows much greater freedom of graphic expression
than an already expressive thrown or moulded form. Some are combined to
form larger wall panels for integration into architectural designs. The
inspiration is again clearly Mediterranean: the use of white, set against
contrasting colours, with splashes of blue and light and shade effects
created through the slightly textured surface.
Another influence has also been at work in the creative process –
the artist’s long standing love for the written word. An avid reader
of poetry and prose, with an innate sense of textuality, he would frequently
note down or memorise snatches of text, culled here and there from his
reading, with no other aim than to fix a fleeting evocation or savour
the sounds and rhythms. These citations have gradually found there way
onto the clay, some meaningful, others simply suggestive, always setting
up echoes in the ear and eye.
His more formal calligraphic style, freely adapted at the outset from
Moorish designs, has evolved to become an individual repertoire of signs
and figures, elaborated over time and now entirely his own. Here, from
his original two-dimensional engraving, his technique has become increasingly
refined and ambitious, culminating in large, hand-thrown pieces of impressive
dimensions: free-standing jars, urns and lidded caskets, whose rough,
mottled, finely engraved surfaces seem to speak to us from beyond time.
Marie White